technicat@bookwyrm.social reviewed Ludicrous by Edward Niedermeyer
Now I know a lot more about the history of Tesla defects
Took me a while to finish this, partly because it's a steady stream of what a bunch of bs comes out of Tesla and Musk, but also I'm reading the ebook which is filled with links to the sources, which generally is a good thing and shows how well this book has been researched and not just a diatribe, but it means half the time when I swipe to next page I jump to the bibliography.
Overall, it buttresses my existing anti-Elon disposition (and the book predates the antics of the past year) with a lot more detail about things that went wrong or were lied about and got people killed, and filled in some company background which I didn't know or had forgotten from Ashlee Vance's Musk bio, which I have trashed a bit recently because seems to have tied his career to profiling Musk, but fair's fair, this …
Took me a while to finish this, partly because it's a steady stream of what a bunch of bs comes out of Tesla and Musk, but also I'm reading the ebook which is filled with links to the sources, which generally is a good thing and shows how well this book has been researched and not just a diatribe, but it means half the time when I swipe to next page I jump to the bibliography.
Overall, it buttresses my existing anti-Elon disposition (and the book predates the antics of the past year) with a lot more detail about things that went wrong or were lied about and got people killed, and filled in some company background which I didn't know or had forgotten from Ashlee Vance's Musk bio, which I have trashed a bit recently because seems to have tied his career to profiling Musk, but fair's fair, this book does rely heavily on Vance's material (minus the stuff about his relationships because who cares about that except when gets sued by his exes).
The book gets a bit shaky talking when referencing both the Silicon Valley software industry and traditional auto industries, portraying their "best" practices as things that actually happen and not aspirational (or bureaucratically buzzwordable), and there's an analogy to the Blackberry keyboard which I found mystifying but reminded me I wish I still had one. Plus that's one of the few tech companies I can think of that I used to admire that hasn't turned evil as far as I know (perhaps not a coincidence, Canadian).